There's a theory that the big problem with Switzerland is that
it doesn't have any big problems. Take away war, strife, indolence
and poverty from a country, and what's left is cheese; without
blood red in the palette, the big picture is painted in pastels.
Orson Welles summed it up in The Third Man: "For 30 years
under the Borgias, Italy had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed,
but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and 500 years
of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo
clock." Bavarians will know the Swiss didn't even manage that.

It's true the edges of Switzerland can feel a bit bevelled
sometimes, like when you see a front-page headline that translates
as "Someone Almost Kidnapped", or when a young, pink-haired punk
gets on a trolley bus, pays, and takes a moment to carefully
straighten a crooked community service announcement. Harmonious
doesn't mean monotone, though - there are four languages, 26
different cantons, and a loose central government that largely lets
everyone do their own thing. Switzerland combines the
ethno-linguistic divisions of the Balkans, the city-state jostling
of Italy and the libertarian leanings of Texas into a recipe for
disaster that somehow works better than just about any other
country on earth.

The cantons don't have much in common by way of law or even
custom, and Swiss national pride is a muted affair. But they do
take pride in their shared railways. "Clean, efficient, high-speed
rail" can mean industrialised farms blurring past at 220km an hour,
but in Switzerland the journey is more like the rail of another era
- the interiors might not be a suitable setting for a murder
mystery, but the pace and the scenery (vast lakes, permanently
snowy peaks) are old-school.

The trains do fulfil the postcard idea of the place - "Swiss" is
a word that sits naturally in front of efficiency, cleanliness and
punctuality. I've boarded these trains for a trip unencumbered by
dirt and delays. But I'm also here to discover that "Swiss" sits
alongside "James Bond's mother" and "legal to own a flamethrower",
to immerse myself in an unexpected and varied place that's like a
well-chosen, slightly eccentric and very distinct mix-tape of
Western European culture.

In the shy capital city of Bern, these trains roll past a huddle
of gunmetal stone buildings and a medieval clock tower, the
Zytglogge. The clock is synchronised to the clocks at the station,
and the trains are synchronised to the clock, a feat that didn't
require a Mussolini to accomplish it. Just to show you can have a
pearl without grit, a young clerk had a good look at that clock
every day on his way to work, and our understanding of time hasn't
been the same since.

Albert Einstein is an unlikely candidate for the title of the
city's most famous resident - the Bernese count themselves
alongside the Irish and the Poles as being proverbially slow. ("Why
shouldn't you tell a joke to someone in Bern on a Friday?" "Because
they might laugh in church.") They're frequently compared to the
ancient symbol of their city, the bear, and, despite the ribbing,
seem to take a kind of pride in being slow and deliberate. They're
also perennially thirsty, which means they make friends easily. Not
far from the city's famous bear pit, I drink a few steins of beer
with a young Bernese businessman on the balcony of the Altes
Tramdepot restaurant. Remo ("In Italian, it means 'I row'") sits
facing the Aar River and tells us about his city.

Bern used to be three cities on this bowed peninsula, and the
town still draws its character from the river - a long, wide loop
of cool water at the foot of a deep valley. "Bern is not as
arrogant as the other cantons," Remo says. "Bernese are easygoing
people, friendly, open, spontaneous." They literally go with the
flow: in summer, bold swimmers walk miles up the banks of the Aar
with rubber rafts, then jump into the waters from a low bridge or
embankment, letting the current carry them down river before
grabbing one of the handles protruding from the bank to drag
themselves out. "You must start trying to get out three or four
handles from the end," says Remo. "Otherwise, miss the last handle,
and you go over the weir." No one can remember this happening.

I ask Remo what Switzerland's problems are generally, and what
Bern's problems are in particular. He thinks for a long time, then
comes up with this: "Swiss people - they're not in a good mood in
the mornings. They will just sit, reading their free newspapers.
That's a real problem." Number one on Remo's list of national
problems is morningitis.

Taking the train from Bern, I board one marvel of Swiss
engineering to see another: Neuchâtel canton is still the epicentre
of the Swiss watchmaking industry. In the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire
in the town of Neuchâtel there are three dolls which have the
cutesy, slightly sinister look of Franklin Mint collectibles. These
are the Automates Jaquet-Droz, some of the oldest robots - and the
first computers - in the world, built by a watchmaking genius some
230 years ago. They have names - the Draughtsman, the Writer, and
the Musician - and in a darkened room their well-oiled operator
puts on a show once reserved for the royalty of Europe.

Once wound up, the draughtsman's pencil picks out a detailed
sketch of a dog, complete with light and shade. The musician
tinkles her way across a real pianola, her chest rising and falling
as she plays; and the writer can produce almost any short sentence,
dipping his quill and following even, flowing script with his
glassy eyes. They're impressive and uncannily chilling at the same
time. When the Automates were first demonstrated for the Spanish
court, the king ordered them pulled apart, trying to find the evil
spirits inside. Watching these weird beings at work, you can see
where he was coming from.

These bizarre and fascinating creations are among the things -
including 140 garish street fountains and a lake where elephants
wash themselves when the circus is in town - that give Neuchâtel a
sense of the surreal. Here the language and the food are French,
and the grey buildings of Bern have given way to the distinctive
yellow stone of Hauterive. The French writer Alexandre Dumas senior
thought it made the place look like a "toy town carved out of
butter", recalling a cruel time when toys were made of butter.

Our next stop takes us away from the train lines, and to a place
that has a different kind of chilling effect. While the sharpness
is coming off the frost elsewhere, La Brévine, just north of the
Val-de-Travers and better known as Swiss Siberia, is still hoary
with swells of snow and ice. This string of dark farms in a valley
is the coldest inhabited place in the country, a place where
cheese-makers, farmers and the odd visiting cross-country skier
brave temperatures as low as minus 35 degrees. The hospitality is
warm, though, and a couple of old farmers, Mr and Mrs Schmidt,
fresh-looking but permanently ruddy with the cold, stop us poking
around the edges of a frozen lake and invite us into their
farmhouse.

The Val-de-Travers is famous for two things: cold and absinthe.
After some not-so-subtle prodding, Mr Schmidt produces a jumbo
bottle of the poison, and Mrs Schmidt goes to the kitchen for the
spoons, coming back with a full set of regalia and performing the
full water pour and louche on the kitchen table. It's weird to take
absinthe with a couple of robust old farmers instead of emaciated
arty types coughing into hankies, but the Schmidts have to keep
warm somehow.

Emboldened (aka tipsy), I ask whether there is any moonshine in
the area, and Mrs Schmidt looks scandalised. "Eau de vie?" she
says. But it doesn't take Mr Schmidt long to produce a heavy bottle
with an ancient label marked "Gentian Pure". "This is a traditional
brew made from the roots of herbs and flowers that grow on the
hillsides nearby," says Mr Schmidt. "This bottle is over 50 years
old. I'd like to offer you some, my special guests from Australia."
Gentian Pure tastes exactly like dirt. Offering thanks with a
barely operational tongue, I head out past a petrified fox,
wondering how he was pickled.

La Brévine isn't the only place that hasn't shaken off its snow
in the Swiss spring, and when I rejoin the train line, it's to
board one of the most famous trains in Switzerland. The Glacier
Express runs from the resort of St Moritz, through Chur, past the
rail hub of Brig, and through to Zermatt. I take it from Chur,
where it tilts almost over the swelling waters of the Rhine, passes
through sloped farms and tiny hilltop church spires, travels along
thin arched bridges, and finally, ratcheted up by a pinion system,
makes its way high into the pass of the Oberalp. Here, 2000 metres
above sea level, it earns its reputation as the slowest express
train in the world, easing up the slopes at less than 40km an hour.
The tiny dark skiers easing down the slopes must be going
faster.

Not far from Chur, there's an even more remote place called
Vals, a tiny alpine village that was once faced with bankruptcy and
an empty hotel. Rather than pack it in, the locals pooled their
natural and financial resources and enticed the reclusive Swiss
architect Peter Zumthor to use the mountain and the natural springs
to create a spa. The modern masterpiece he created is called Therme
Vals, and it draws cars and coaches up the mountain roads to this
remote place for most of the year. From 60,000 slabs of locally
quarried Valser quartzite, Zumthor built a cathedral to water: a
cavernous series of pools and steam rooms bathed in cool natural
light, capped off by a turf roof that gives the whole edifice an
ancient feel, as though it was carved out of the mountain
itself.

Outside, a pool of naturally warm spring water extends into the
open air, where steam mixes with frosted breath, and swimmers can
take in the clouded mountains on the horizon. It's an isolated,
stark, beautiful place at the foot of a mountain, where the almost
sheer farms (some can be accessed only by sled) make you wonder
what type of people must have settled here. On the ridge against
the skyline, someone pushes something, inching it along the
precipitous ridge. It's a pram.

Vals is one of the few areas of the country where Switzerland's
fourth official language, Romansh, is still spoken. Only around
35,000 speakers are left, and because there are at least five
different dialects, many struggle to understand even each other.
Bilingualism and TV are slowly killing the language, but pockets of
the distinct Romansh culture survive. At a local café, we're
treated to a specialty called capuns. It's a mixture of bacon,
cheese, three different kinds of chopped sausage, milk, eggs and
herbs, wrapped in silverbeet, cooked in milk and bouillon,
garnished with cheese and bacon, all served in a glossy soup that
could be broth but turns out to be melted butter. Romansh culture
might be imperilled, but not as imperilled as the Romansh are by
their own cuisine.

Far from the earthy, larded world of the Romansh is the urbane
façade of Montreux, on the shores of Lake Geneva. There are no
signs of fish in the lake. "It's actually too clean to support
life," a local tells me, a verdict that at first glance could apply
to the town itself, a spectacular but staid congregation of old
buildings and new boutiques hunched over a lakeside boulevard,
overseen by the Belle Epoque balconies of the Grand Hôtel
Suisse-Majestic.

But this quiet place has long played a role as a kind of capital
of bohemia, taking in artists, writers, musicians and layabouts for
centuries. It might owe as much to the tax breaks as to the
scenery, but these grand buildings have served as an unlikely
backdrop for the turns of the culture and counterculture, full of
serendipitous meetings and strange collaborations, with everyone
from Dostoevsky to Shania Twain in occasional residence. Their
presence is still felt in the annual jazz festival.

The weird history starts before we've even left the station: it
was here that Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who invented LSD,
bumped into Timothy Leary, his unwanted hippy evangelist, and gave
him a stern talking to. When the old casino was burnt down in 1971
by an excitable Frank Zappa fan, Deep Purple were eyewitnesses -
the water in "Smoke on the Water" is here. Charlie Chaplin
spent his dotage at nearby Vevey, and is commemorated by a statue
on the shore of the lake. It's since been upstaged by a monument to
Freddie Mercury, who also saw out his days here; he stands facing
the waters in a one-fisted salute. "If you want peace for your
soul, go to Montreux," Mercury told his friends, and he chose a
view across the lake for the cover of Queen's Made in
Heaven album. With subtle afternoon sun casting down on the
far shore, it doesn't look so different today.

A few minutes down the coast is another waterscape immortalised
by a visitor. Whether or not the "Byron" in the stones of Chillon
Castle was scratched there by Lord Byron himself, there's no doubt
the place made a deep impression on him. You can hear the lap of
the water from the dungeon where the monk and politician François
Bonivard spent six years chained to a pillar - a story which
inspired Byron's epic poem The Prisoner of Chillon. Byron
himself became a tourist attraction in the town of Lausanne, where
English tourists would stay in the Angleterre hotel, training their
binoculars on his house, trying to glimpse him doing something
scandalous.

On the train out of Lausanne, casually awed by the scenery
again, I think back not just on the things I have seen in
Switzerland, but the things I haven't. It takes some time here to
notice what you're not seeing: dirt, homelessness, penury, rage,
anyone - man or woman - who doesn't look a little bit like Roger
Federer. But the tranquillity doesn't feel bloodless, especially
not once you've found the warm register of Swiss eccentricity and
variety; sometimes it is stilted and strange, but for those who
take the time to find it, it is as welcoming as it is humble.